skype on XO-1.75

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:15 AM,  <forster at ozonline.com.au> wrote:
> Installing Skype on the XO-1.75 using the instructions at wiki.laptop.org/go/Skype does not work.

As others have pointed out, Skype (the company) does not publish a
"skype-for-linux, ARM version". AIUI, they will never do so, and
probably they'll stop caring about the current skype-for-linux
x86/x86_64 real soon.

They do publish a devkit that has libraries for various platforms, and
I've been told it has an ARM binary library. The documentation is
interesting -- clearly they have a library to make it easy to build
your own UI to skype; and they have Python bindings (and examples!).

So if some enterprising soul wanted to sign up for their dev program
(there's a small fee, I believe) you can look at what's inside,
perhaps even try to run the python samples on our hw. A Python client
means a Sugar-ish client is possible, if you want to look at the
upside. (The downsides are well documented :-) ).

Here I am glossing over some complications -- ARM is a bit more
fragmented that x86, so a unified ARM version is possible, but would
likely suck badly on all platforms. You'd want ARMv5tel for our
current build, which would perhaps be so-so, and then ARMv7hl for the
OS we'll prepare next year.

Similar concerns affect Flash-for-Linux on ARM and any
performance-sensitive binary plugins you can think of.

One good piece of news is that Skype isn't the only game in town.
Google-talk-plugin has been my friend lately, and competes with Skype
plenty in my personal usage (it's the plugin behind gmail/gchat voice
+ video, g+ hangouts, and google's own int'l dialling service).

hth,


m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff